How a Global Banking and Financial Services Company Achieved a Single Base Image for More Than 100,000 Virtual Desktop Users

Company Overview

Our customer is a global banking and financial services company with more than 100,000 employees in over 50 countries. Due to the distributed nature of their workforce, IT must also meet complex security, compliance, and workflow requirements while supporting a wide spectrum of end user desktop capabilities.

Background

The financial institution has three standard end-user experiences available for its many user roles: a non-persistent VDI experience, a persistent VDI experience, and a physical system. Users begin with the non-persistent system and are only granted access to other experiences if they run into difficulties fulfilling their duties in the non-persistent environment.

Using a combination of environments, the company was able to deliver many, though not all, of these experiences to its end users. Prior to engaging with Numecent, they had a large environment consisting of Citrix App Layering and Microsoft App-V. Unfortunately, IT had not been able to make all required applications available across the business.

Challenges

In an enterprise-wide modernization of the Citrix VDI environment, the company needed to move its applications from Windows 7 to Windows 10 to effectively leverage their new Windows Server 2016 environment. This required IT to repackage its Windows application estate. Traditionally, App-V was their virtualization solution of choice. However, they were simply unable to virtualize approximately 30 percent of their applications, with more than 40 percent of failing to deploy or raising issues during testing.  

As an example, many of the applications had a prerequisite requiring a specific Java version. The applications would need the ability to communicate or integrate with each other, but at the same time, use only the specific version of Java needed by each individual application. IntelliJ required the 64-bit Oracle 18_1_04 JDK while NodeJS 4.2.2 required JDK 7u111.

A direct migration to Citrix did not provide the company with business advantages, as challenges with their existing application management tools persisted across legacy and new systems. Native installs of the problematic applications would bloat the base image or cause multiple base images to be maintained, which prevented IT from achieving their end goal of singular gold images.

Even for the applications that were already packaged, IT found large volumes of applications that could not run on non-persistent systems. As a result, IT created A second and third desktop IT stack utilizing using VMware’s AppVolumes and AppStacks as workarounds for delivering applications that could not run in the primary non-persistent environment. This yielded significant overhead for the IT team, as they had far too many base images to manage, compounding scaling challenges and licensing costs.

Solution

Due to its unprecedented application compatibility rate and ease of deployment, the company chose Cloudpaging to virtualize its Windows desktop application estate.

Cloudpaging containers also enabled them to run applications on non-persistent multi-session operating systems, including those that were not inherently designed to do so. According to Microsoft’s own cost calculator, running Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session can cut VDI costs more than 6X.

Results

Key outcomes also include:

• Consolidation to Citrix for all application needs
• Successfully virtualizing 500+ legacy and modern applications
• No prerequisite conflicts
• Enabled application deployment to any physical or virtual Windows desktop
• Any version of a Windows application can run across their enterprise
• IT achieved a single base image for more than 100,000 virtual desktop users

The enterprise also benefited from significantly reduced administrative effort and costs associated with packaging by utilizing Cloudpaging, further reducing the expense of the solution.

Looking Ahead

Numecent provided the enterprise financial institution with the means to consolidate to its Citrix platform and achieve a single base image to service more than 100,000 virtual desktop users. IT can seamlessly deliver any application needed by a user in a secure and compliant manner, regardless of where they reside or their varying desktop capability requirements.

Because Cloudpaging containers can run on any modern Windows desktop environment, these same applications will be able to seamlessly lift and shift across their enterprise without the need to be repackaged. This is true for existing and emerging Windows technologies alike, including Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Windows 11, and future iterations of Windows operating systems.

Learn More

From application compatibility challenges to enterprise-scale cloud and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) adoption, Numecent enables you to drastically simplify the mobilization and management of Windows applications across modern desktop and multi-cloud environments. To see Cloudpaging in action, schedule a demonstration with our Solutions Architects.